It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed 'Wisdom.' And then I know exactly what is going to follow: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'
The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thought.
Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.
Words are probes. Some reach very deep, some only to a little depth.
A logical picture of facts is a thought.
Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.
Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.
About what one can not speak, one must remain silent.
Don't think, but look! (PI 66)
Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. ...Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.
Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.
Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often what we need?
6.4311 Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens. Den Tod erlebt man nicht. Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt. Unser Leben ist ebenso endlos, wie unser Gesichtsfeld grenzenlos ist. 6.4311 Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.
Don't ask what it means, but rather how it is used.
My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. . . .
The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.
The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas, that is what makes him a philosopher.
To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.
What Copernicus really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view.
There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
My work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.
The world is independent of my will.
Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.
I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.
A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.
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